The invention relates to an arrangement for exchanging supporting or driving rollers of a continuous casting plant with a strand guide including two oppositely arranged roller ways, the arrangement comprising a sled that is movable between the roller ways for transporting a roller to and away from a bearing place in one of the roller ways, which sled is equipped with roller seats receiving the rollers and includes means for moving a roller from its bearing place to the sled and from the sled to the bearing place.
The supporting and driving rollers in continuous casting plants, in particular in continuous steel casting plants, constitute especially highly worn machine parts. Their service life is relatively short as compared with other machine parts of continuous casting plants. For this reason the supporting and driving rollers quite frequently must to be exchanged for new or overhauled rollers in the course of maintenance works. If there is a failure of certain supporting or driving rollers, the defective rollers must to be replaced within the shortest time possible in order to avoid longer stop periods of the plant.
From U.S. Pat. No. 4,012,825 an arrangement of the initially-defined kind is known, wherein for instance an installation of a roller into the continuous casting plant is effected in a manner that the roller to be installed is placed into a roller seat of the sled, is transported to between the roller ways by the sled and is inserted into the bearing place of the roller way by means of a guide which is laterally fastenable to the sled or to the roller ways and on which guide a follower is guided which is engageble with the respective roller end of the roller to be installed.
The attachment of the lateral displacement means necessitates the consumption of additional time. An operator must enter laterally of the strand guide as far as to the roller to be exchanged in order to attach the displacement means. This is a difficult procedure due to the small space laterally of the strand guide.